Walls and Resettlement

A wall divides them.
The extremely poor live on one side. The ultra-rich live on the other.
Extremely poor for the most part means black. Extremely rich, unfortunately, is
still mostly white.

Cape Town-based
photographer and anthropologist, Johnny Miller, took a series of aerial
photographs[1]
that show how a road, a wall, a small no-man’s land of vegetation divide the
rich from the poor.

Probably the most
famous image[2]
shows on the one side Hout Bay, an affluent seaside resort town that attracts
thousands of foreign tourists and locals to its beaches and restaurants. On the
other side, up on a hill is Imizamo Yethu, a 57 hectare informal settlement
that is home to about 34,000 people. Devastating fires regularly rage through
the shacks leaving families, who have very little anyway, with nothing at all.

This image is not
unique to Hout Bay/Imizamo Yethu or even Cape Town. We see it in every South
African city and small town throughout our country. Sandton, South Africa’s
economic powerhouse on the outskirts of Johannesburg, bordered by Alexandra, is
one of the poorest and most desperate places in the country. Morningside and
its adjoining golf estate in Durban are across from the Kennedy Road informal
settlement. The peaceful and lush winelands of Stellenbosch abut the Kayamandi
squatter camp.

Apartheid South Africa
created these divided communities, a project which Miller describes as the
“architecture of separation,” to promote the ideals of the white, nationalist
state. People of color were forcibly removed to locations where they could
become invisible.

However, as South
Africa has evolved, the cities have grown. Qualified professionals find better
paying jobs and new opportunities in the cities, and so the demand for middle-class
and high-end homes has increased. The poor too, allured by the promise of
employment and a better life, have flocked to the cities. Only for them, there
are no homes. Instead they compete with each other for 18 square feet of land
to put up a shack and dream of a better life.

And so, as both
suburbia and the slum continue to grow, the two polarities of South African
society have once again come into contact. The result is often violent
confrontation, and clear defiance of the twenty-four-year black government that
appears to be unable or unwilling to dismantle this physical and spatial legacy
of apartheid.

To a large extent, the
poor and disenfranchised have given up on peacefully calling on the state to
provide access to water, electricity, adequate health and education services. Instead,
protests often spiral out of control – burning tires, burning buses, burning
schools, burning clinics, looting, clashes with security personnel.

Our new president,
Cyril Ramaphosa, has made it clear that the status quo cannot continue and is
attempting to introduce some measure equality by calling for radical land
reform. In part, this means expropriating land without compensation from those
who previously benefitted from a system that privileged white people.

As one might imagine,
not everyone has welcomed this call. Those of us who have land and houses
suddenly fear that we may lose our homes, often our main asset. What will
happen to us if we are forced to leave our homes? Not all of us can simply
afford to buy something else. Losing a farm or losing a home could make many
people destitute.

Nothing has been legislated
yet and the government realizes that it will have to approach land reform and
expropriation with care. In the meantime, for some, the proximity of Hout Bay
and Imizamo Yethu is far too close for comfort.

Luanda: A city of extremes
between the new elite and the masses

In Angola, the civil
war left its scars. Some of the scars are on the buildings of Luanda, where in
1992, the war entered the capital for the first and last time. The result was
the mass killing of opposition UNITA supporters.

After the end of the
war in 2002, the MPLA-led government set out on a project of national
reconstruction that sought to eliminate all evidence of the 27-year confusão (confusion), a metaphor for the
civil war.

During the years of
war, Luanda became a safe haven, as the massacres mostly occurred in the
countryside. So it happened that a city
originally designed by the Portuguese for 500,000 people was bursting at the
seams after the war. Today, Luanda’s population is about four million.

The old colonial
neighborhoods burgeoned and expanded into a sprawling chaos of formal and
informal construction. Basic services such as sanitation and electricity all
but collapsed in many areas.

The new arrivals from Angola’s
villages and towns do not fit into the government’s narrative of a new modern
Angola. The disorganized suburbs of downtown Luanda also did not fit the image
of a city that would become the symbol of the quick success brought by oil
wealth.

The government
undertook a project of requalificação
urbana (urban upgrading) to bring Luanda into the twenty-first century, but
researcher Jon Schubert prefers to describe this undertaking as “spatial
cleansing” to rid the city center of any remnants of war or the people that the
government would rather forget, as it sets about building the New Angola.[3]

Photographs of Luanda
Bay with its palm-lined streets, promenade, wide avenues and world class
restaurants boasting the very best of international cuisine are impressive and represent
the Angola that the government wants to show the world. In this world of
modern, educated elites, there is no room for the hustlers, the matumbos (uneducated country bumpkins)
or o povo (the people).

As a result, many of
the downtown musseques (neighorhoods)
were razed to the ground to make room for impressive skyscrapers and upmarket
developments. The inhabitants of the musseques
were forcibly removed without compensation and relocated to places such as the
Kilamba Kiaxi housing project, some fifteen kilometers from the city center.
News reports indicate that these new suburbs lack running water and
electricity; sewage collects in the streets; the roads are of poor quality and
it often takes more than an hour for residents to get into the city.[4]

Apartheid polarized
South Africans, and the extremities between the abundance of the rich and the
poverty of the poor remain entrenched and have become a cause of conflict as
the disenfranchised poor seek a share in some of the wealth, while the rich,
finding themselves under siege, raise the walls that divide the two
communities.

In Angola, war brought
people from all walks of life together. This diversity is chaotic and unsightly
to the government. So in an effort to promote a new and modern post-war country,
the state has built extremity into the physical landscape. The rich elite,
almost all of whom have ties to someone in government, live in the spanking new
city center, while o povo, who make
up the masses of the Angolan nation, have been pushed out to the extremities of
the city, lamenting their demolished homes and having to get used to becoming
invisible in a new kind of apartheid.